Adrian Johnston
speaker
618 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard Jan 2020
Adrian Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But of course, Engels already, in collaboration with Marx, seeks to look at, well, how Marx's theoretical framework of historical materialism, which Marx brings to bear on human beings and their societies, how that could be broadened out into a more all-encompassing materialist worldview that could also deal with pre- and non-human nature over and above human beings and their social reality.
And, you know, there's a very complicated history to the development of dialectical materialism, starting with this Engelsian ambition and continuing up through the present.
And it's an issue which, for instance, has been a big bone of contention between, you know, if you go back to the early 20th century, the very split between
Western Marxism and then, you know, Eastern Soviet varieties, you know, goes back to Georg Lukacs' 1923 magnum opus, History and Class Consciousness, in which there are swipes at Engels and, you know, there are claims that, you know, historical materialism actually should already indicate that Engels' attempt to broaden it into dialectical materialism is misguided.
because we can never deal with nature itself, only nature as it features within human societies and with their ideologies, et cetera.
And so Engels regresses to this naive, pre-Marxian, pre-German idealist realism.
And there's no prospect of us having a materialism talking about nature apart from society.
Just give that up.
And the Soviets in 1924 condemn Lukács for an idealist deviation here.
They, starting with Plakhanov, Lenin, etc., they were already very committed to pushing forward with the development of a Marxian materialism as interfaced with especially the natural sciences.
And this was central to
developments of Soviet Marxism and also to Mao's version of Marxist materialism.
But Western European Marxists generally took the Lukachian, the early Lukachian route that Lukach later recanted, but the Lukachian route of just rejecting that as a dead end, as intellectual bankruptcy.
And so there's all of this in the background.
And I deal with this, I had a book
come out in September of 2019, the second volume of this three-volume project entitled Prologamna to Any Future Materialism.
And the whole second section of that book deals with this complicated history in terms of the development of dialectical over and above historical materialism.
But Zizek, one of the things that he's interested in doing in the formulation you quoted and similar ones is that
he sometimes essentially makes the move of reducing dialectical materialism, or what he calls dialectical materialism, distilling it into basically a doctrine about modal categories.
So when we talk about contingency and necessity, contingency and necessity are both modal categories.
Showing 221–240 of 618 · page 12 of 31
← Previous
Next →